User blog:Lhikan634/Guide to writing articles
Hey all. I thought I'd get out a few tips on the various components of writing articles. Some of these aspects will touch on things on our Manual of Style, but others are just general suggestions. Where to Start Writing an article can seem like a daunting task, especially if you're starting from scratch. Sometimes the easiest thing may be to start with the overview / description; other times it may be easier to start with some of the history details. When in doubt, start with what you know. One of the easiest things may be to fill in the Infobox data and then work from there. Sections Different types of articles (location, episode, Seeker, Character, spell, artifact, etc.) have a slightly different layout. As need be, other sections may be added, such as subsections under the History section for Titans used by different Seekers (such as Dante's Freelancer and Lok's Freelancer). When writing an article, it's best to keep the material organized by these sections. While a section may seem to be short, adding irrelevant information makes reading the article be more difficult. (For instance, that would be like me referring to how to construct a template within this section). Style Probably one of the more difficult aspects is what writing style to use for an article. Basically, the Huntik Wiki uses a historical perspective. What this means is that non-episode articles should be written in the past tense and in-universe as if we were describing real events instead of fictional events. We aren't Wikipedia; there's no need to say that any event or character (etc.) is fictional. Also, as we're more or less trying to write in the style of historians in the universe of Huntik, we want to be very careful about calling something the first or last anything. We're only seeing a sample of events, so it becomes difficult, for instance, to determine an absolute first invocation of a Titan considering that there were thousands of undocumented years after Lord Casterwill brought the Titans to Earth. Spelling and Grammar Spelling is an easy thing to check since unrecognized words should be underlined in red. While this system doesn't recognize a number of Huntik-related words, most of thee obvious spelling errors will be flagged. Please make use of this tool. Grammar is quite important with regard to making sure that the audience can understand the material. On the other hand, you don't want to sound overly formal. A good balance makes everything sound properly professional. While Wikia doesn't have a grammar check, you can always open up a word processing application (Word, Appleworks, Pages, etc.) and do a very basic grammar check. Also, I'm just going to say… there's a certain level of poor use of English that just makes the writer look like a fool. By that, I mean it's so bad that the user would have flunked second-grade English courses, majorly. It's also easy to tell the difference between a non-native author and an author who simply is not trying (or is trying to look bad). One of the other admins is not a native English speaker, so it's possible to have good contributions under those conditions. The main thing is to approach this somewhat seriously, knowing that it will be published and viewable by anyone on the Internet. Put your best foot forward. Anything minor should be caught by another editor (myself and Seeker11299 tend to go through most current edits). When possible, try to impress others. Super simple sentences such as "He is big." may be grammatically correct, but they may lack some of the gusto that draws in the readers. Paragraphing Deciding how to divide an article's content into paragraphs can be a daunting task. While some articles can be divided into one paragraph per episode, doing so may leave other articles with a lot of single-sentence paragraphs. On the other hand, dividing articles by episode groups may result in some paragraphs becoming a wall of text. Probably the easiest thing to look for are definitive shifts in the character's plot. Sometimes these will be story arcs. For instance, "Into the River of Secrets," "Crawling the Catacombs," and "Divide and Conquer" all concern the quest for the Ring of Arc. Other times, these will be definitive transitions to the person's character, such as Zhalia's revealing her betrayal of the Huntik Foundation and her later redemption. In general, make sure that the paragraph transition makes sense and groups relevant information together without including "irrelevant" bits. Another tip is to make sure that paragraphs do not get too long; long paragraphs are more difficult to read and are especially difficult to skim for information. Category:Blog posts Category:Admin blog